A Mindful of Architecture
by CrossMikado
Summary: One last dream, a theft and their word that she would entrap them in her mazes once more. As soon as a job comes up.  Ariadne
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

The last time she'd dreamt, she had built an opera house, a huge structure of steel and stone, large panes of glass opening onto the streets of a disconcertingly French city. It was Arthur's subconscious which had filled the stage from its velvet curtains to its golden moldings with a German opera none of them had ever heard of. Eames had remarked upon the "screeching bird-like quality" of the main singer's voice.

This final dream had been Eames' idea.

Ariadne could not recount the exact moment her apprehensions had dissolved. One second she felt they were all going separate ways, what with Cobb progressing towards the door as if he were treading water, and then disappearing behind Professor Miles.

Taking a look around her, she had caught the eye of her soon to be ex-partners, and realized they were all at a standstill. Yusuf pretended to be looking for a suitcase that he had set between his feet, Arthur had crossed his arms over his trolley, watching his perfectly polished shoes, and Eames had faked a bow, beckoning her forward.

Yusuf had suggested they take a taxi, Saito had offered a car he had seemingly dreamt out of thin air.

"For now, there is nothing more that I can do to reward you", he had proffered. "This, and the wages we agreed upon, which are immediately available," he added, offhandedly.

Ariadne had barely had time to shake his hand before entering the vehicle. Arthur had given the driver the name of a hotel which in itself seemed as luxurious as the car's upholstery.

"What happens now?"

She hadn't wanted to ask. Going home was an unwanted necessity rather than a priority.

"Well, usually, we disappear", Eames had answered, and he didn't need a smile to let the sarcasm filter. "Given a job out of two tends to fail."

"It happens when you don't have the means to achieve the job", Arthur intervened, eliciting a retort from Eames that he cut short. "We have to blend in, it's a fact. We can benefit from Saito's gratitude nonetheless."

"Ariadne, tell me", Eames cut in again, "when do you intend to go home?"

She had shrugged. Soon, because she would have to. But she would delay as long as she could. Their mere presence brought clenching hopes of circular streets, topless towers, unharmed medieval castles and trees hanging from their roots. She hadn't recaptured her grip on reality yet, in spite of the bishop she had not let go since disembarking.

"Let's go under once more, then. We deserve a bit of fun."

Arthur had deemed it unwise, Eames had advocated they hadn't exchanged their different experiences of the Fischer job yet. Ariadne had silenced both by admitting she liked the idea.

There had been the snow white suite registered under an alias of Eames', the champagne Arthur had barely had a sip of, and then the opera house, the streets around it that went in circles, until they walked them to their end and there was the opera house again, gleaming in the sunlight.

On the plane back to France, her chin resting on the palm of her hand, Ariadne watches her memories of the dream fade, merge into one another. Tales that defy gravity, Arthur adding a discreet smirk to the occasional glance he steals at her, talking with his back against a monumental door she stole from the Roman Pantheon. Eames enjoys describing the destruction of the fort it had taken her weeks to create, adding details she is pretty sure he is making up, unless he had spies in each and every snowdrift. Yusuf was enthusiastic over one particular stunt he pulled with the van. Arthur's lips twitch as if he remembered the somersaults, too.

"I want you to let me know if a new job comes up", she had said when it was all over and they were back in the hotel.

She had not believed their nods of agreement. She knew for one Yusuf already had a plane ticket for Kenya and guesses it would take at least an inception to bring him back. She also put to question Arthur and Eames' life span in a shared hotel suite.

She hadn't left empty-handed, however. There was the five-digit number her bank account suddenly held, of course. There was the bishop on the plastic table in front of her, which she toppled with a pinch, watching it fall and spin on the smooth surface. And Eames' last treat.

"You will hear from me", Arthur had said, facing her in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his trousers, forbidding her any handshake.

Eames had to get around him to slap her shoulder with a grin. He stuffed a crumpled tissue in the pocket of her vest.

"Here, in case you miss me, dear."

Yusuf had accompanied her to the airport, clueless as to why she would not wait the night through in the expensive suite instead of rushing towards a seat that is not even in first class. He had taken her hand in both of his and wished they would meet again. She still wondered if he truly meant it.

She didn't venture a hand into her pocket until an hour after the take-off. The tissue was blank if not spotless, soaked in champagne, and Arthur's totem fell from it, joining her bishop on the table before she quite understood what it was, and how it had come to be here.

She dropped the tissue before the dice settled on a particular side, folded the paper upon it. She thought back to the way Eames had shouldered past Arthur, and wondered how she could give it back to the point man, if he would even want it back.

For now, it went back inside her pocket. She decided to stow it in some corner of her mind, where it would trigger memories, leaving to the bishop the rekindling of the creative process.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

The next extraction should have been simple enough. The mark, daughter of a computing tycoon, had disclosed easily the plans of the device that would supplant her elder brother's latest creation. Her ultimate aim was to overthrow the brother, taking hold of the family heirloom once his discredit was firmly established.

As far as Arthur was concerned, the disbanding of a family business rang a bell, even as the extraction was supposed to prevent it this time around.

The mark was a bright but coy young woman, intent on acquiring power over a world she barely knew. The possibility that she might be living a dream completely evaded her. She believed her mind to be free of any subconsciously repressed thoughts or desires. She inhabited a geometrical space which had been recreated by the team's architect with an endless supply of rulers and blackboards.

Arthur fitted in this dreamscape.

He added doors and floors until the numbers made sense and in the third building he only had to blow up the fifth wall in the first room of the fourteenth floor to find the safe.

Then there was an argument with his partner about what they should do until the dream ended, the extractor intent on shooting them both while Arthur observed it might have alerted the mark. It was the mark who got shot in the back when he tried to repel a projection drawn by the rising voices.

"Let's be practical", said the extractor afterwards. He was a middle-aged man you wouldn't notice in a street – unless you were the point man and prone to take note of the most catch-all disguise. "You shot the girl in the dream. Up here she is very alive, and convinced she just dozed off in her limo. We deliver, gather, and part."

"Being practical isn't enough", Arthur retorted, draping his raincoat over his arm, grabbing the silver case from the table. "At least not for everyone present. We had agreed I was responsible for the planning. You screwed up. I'm not working with you again."

"Such high standards", the extractor sneered. "You won't find some clone of Cobb to replace him, and you should get over it."

Arthur acknowledged the architect on his way out, a brief nod that the young man returned. He might see this one again, a thin, ghost-like figure with wide black eyes. Though he did not have Ariadne's exuberant skills, this architect was hard-working and efficient, with that eager creativity shared by the handful of dream-architects he had known.

For that purpose the architects were most often architecture students when they started, still filled-up to the brim with "dreams of cathedrals", as Cobb put it; this belief that one could build with his mind structures what should require hundreds of hands and numerous decades to be achieved in reality.

Upon arriving at Cobb's house, Arthur was greeted by Cobb's mother-in-law, an elegant French woman who disliked him half as much as she did Cobb, but who persisted in being present in the house as often as possible. Now that Cobb had started maneuvering her out, this meant around once or twice a week. According to Cobb, she was there to prevent him from harming the children.

"How did it go?" Cobb asked, slightly out of breath and maybe overdoing it, as if he were still playing with his children, emphasizing his so-called indifference to the world he had given up.

Arthur had a brisk smile that didn't reach his eyes. "You're incurable."

"Well, I didn't set you a trap. Dinner is ready, and as long as we don't bring the subject to the table, you can enjoy the meal and the company of James and Phillipa. I can't guarantee they'll recognize you, though."

"It went okay. Mostly."

Cobb frowned and Arthur went through the extraction again, insisting on the mathematical laws that defined the girl's dream, the way they cornered her need of rationality by furnishing her with logic in the least logic space one could inhabit.

"The plans were encoded but the code was in the safe, too. She could hardly hide it anywhere else."

"How could you shoot her?"

Cobb sounded reproachful, but then it was not the first time, and his disapproval was well-rehearsed throughout numerous failures that had been the responsibility of one or the other on the field.

"How many times did you shoot me?" Arthur replied immediately, with that underlying anger that could pass off as disdain. "You know better than anyone that the smallest human failure down there grows to uncontrollable proportions. The extractor messed up, the projections closed in on us. It was a Catch-22."

"Changing partners already, then. You're a keeper, Arthur."

"The architect might be more of a follow-up than an inventive guy, but I can do with him."

They were walking around the garden; Cobb had his hands in his pockets and his eyes to the ground, frowning thoughtfully as if he were still in the game, providing the point man with visions he would have to translate into raw material.

"You could have called Ariadne", Cobb remarked, the question behind his factual tone unavoidable.

"I could have."

There was a new totem in his pocket that had yet to feel real, and another one in a room in Paris that was no longer reliable.

Ariadne had sounded in a hurry when he had called, and when he had remarked upon it, she had appealed to a class that was about to start and a missing scarf. She had taken the time to introduce the plans she had drawn, for a church taking a leaf out of the Byzantine tradition for the cupolas and of Le Corbusier for the lighting of the nave.

"I was wondering what you wanted to do about your totem", she had said when she could no longer add details to her inlaid mosaics. "I haven't touched it, by the way. How do I get it back to you?"

"You don't. Keep it for now."

Arthur and Cobb were back in the living room, James and Phillipa had been seated minutes before but they were now running around the room, chasing each other around the table, the potted plants, the couch or Arthur's legs. Cobb was not exactly smiling, but his features were no longer taut, as if the worry and wariness had been scrapped from his face.

Arthur had never been concerned about his own. There was an irreducible smoothness to his whole figure. The worse extraction could not alter that mask. Being suave was part of the job.

He thought back to his conversation with Ariadne, how she had immediately brought up casual details about her studies, her life in Paris. He occulted her excessive designs, a clue to how she was really feeling. He occulted the rush of blood her voice had brought about, a momentary lapse in his composure that had taken only seconds to quell.

"She is finding a way back", he told Cobb. "That's fine with me."

"There is no way back."

The sentence weighted in the air for a moment, as Cobb ruffled James' hair affectionately.

"Do me a favor", Cobb said, just as Arthur noticed the spinning top forgotten under a chair, barely visible against a crimson rug. "Don't let her talent be wasted. I'll keep an eye on her, but I can no longer give her what she is soon going to crave."

As Cobb filled the children's plates with mashed potatoes, he added between his teeth; "I won't have her lose herself because of me."

* * *

_**Author's Note: **Thanks for the feedback!_

_I don't want to consider this story from the productivity angle, but I can mention that the updates should not take so long in the future (a week abroad was the reason for this chapter's delay). __Read and review please! This is as much about drawing inspiration from a film I loved as entertaining fellow fans._


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

For a while Ariadne was in Paris again.

She had found her flat in the state she'd left it in, in perfect order, though it didn't stay so for long. Soon there were sketches pinned up the walls, empty take-out boxes strewn across the floor, discarded jeans thrown over the couch. It felt safer that way, as if she were inhabiting the space again.

Then came the friends, fellow students from college who would take hold of her arm and of her mind, dragging her to bars where they could discuss the latest felony of their history of architecture teacher. Some of those friends had "plans" and "visions". One particularly drunk night, Paul from her French class had spoken of building bridges across time, and had tried to back up his delirium with scientific laws.

Ariadne had told them about a cathedral she had drawn, and they had discussed the impossibility of building such a structure in their time, when the construction would not be governed by centuries of faith. She built the cathedral in a dream, stone by stone. Maybe the projections had helped. It had felt difficult, it had felt true.

She didn't reach out for her bishop so often anymore, but as she wrote essays, built scale models or gave an account of some assignment she'd been given, she couldn't shake off the ingrained idea that it was all lies, illusions and paradoxes; and sometimes she couldn't quite grasp the reality anymore. Sometimes she couldn't wake up.

Not that she had lost track of reality. It appeared that reality was no longer that relevant. She tossed around Mal's "creeping doubt", that dreams were not so intangible, that dreams were the real thing.

After Arthur had called, she had wondered what had become of them all. She wondered if inception had become a common good – and "good" was perhaps not the word to use.

She had received a letter from Cobb a few days ago, handed over by Professor Miles. Cobb seemed to be fine, though true to himself he didn't put it that way and the letter was overflowing with advice as he enjoined her not to dream too much, not to dream of dreaming. He added that he would be pleased to see her and that if she ever came back to the States she had to pay him a visit, with Miles maybe.

She had found suitable paper for an answer, and she had tried to formulate a letter, speaking to herself in her living room (which also served as a bedroom and kitchen). The episode led to much cursing and torn paper. There were too many issues, from the temptation to sever all ties to her ex-colleagues to the certainty that she was being followed and that he might not be the right person to tell.

She could not tell for sure when it had started. Sometime after Arthur's phone call, and before Cobb's letter. It was not the feeling of being watched that alerted her; she saw them with her own eyes – one man, and a woman, as far as she could tell, one after the other and sometimes together. She saw them in the back booth of the café where she had her breakfast, the man hiding behind a newspaper, the woman reapplying lipstick to her already cherry-red lips. The man would be leaning against a street lamp when she came out from college, squeezed into a jacket that was far too tight for his stout stature. The woman was slender, with rippling hair of a rich brown color and tailored suits under a peach-colored coat.

If they were stalking her, they were doing a pretty bad job. She couldn't bring herself to be scared yet, not of such a burlesque couple, not after the snow fort, the free fall from Cobb and Mal's skyscraper, the knife Mal had plunged into her chest on the Bir-Hakeim bridge.

She managed a pleasant enough letter for Cobb, with the help of a friend who had crashed on her couch after a night out. Having had an assignment to finish, Ariadne had refused to join in the festivities, but had had no other option than to lend her sofa when Anne had arrived at two a.m., an indecent time for subway trains. She had trouble explaining the context of her letter to Anne – who in the end perceived Cobb as a benevolent if not paranoiac uncle.

Having someone around that night did not turn out to be as demanding as she had thought. By the time she got up Anne was gone, the letter was ready to be posted and there was coffee in the coffee pot. And Arthur was sitting by the door.

"Your friend let me in. I hope you don't mind."

"No, no I – don't", she volunteered after a second, looking left and right for any other apparition. "Except I would appreciate it if you could wait here while I got dressed."

She caught him glancing at her tank top and sweatpants and frowned. Judging from her clock it was around eight in the morning, and he was already clad in one of his three-piece suits, which he had managed not to crease while sitting on the floor.

"You can sit on a chair", she offered.

When she came back, he had helped himself to some of the coffee.

"You came for your totem, right?"

He was studying from afar the sketches on the walls, the models on the ground. The room was a maze in itself and it would have taken hours to solve it.

Arthur drew his hand out of his pocket, held a blue dice for her to see before putting it away.

"I couldn't spare the time. It seemed proper to find a new one."

"Because you couldn't trust me", she pointed out, crossing over to the kitchen. She sat opposite him, elbows on the table, resting her forehead against her palm. "It's not only a job for you, is it? The dreams. You're as addicted as Cobb was. Is."

She pushed away the unnerving thought that she would take on the role of his conscience as easily as she had been Cobb's.

"Have you been under since I left? Because I am ready to bet half of the mazes in this room that there were job offers in those four weeks. And I would bet the other half that you did not offer once to hire me."

As Arthur watched her from across the table, she realized she didn't know him at all. She had explored Cobb's motivations inside out, but there was little she knew about Arthur. She had thought him to be governed by cold logic, but it had taken a few paradoxes and a stolen kiss to unbalance that picture.

"I wouldn't have hired you to work with an extractor I didn't know", he replied.

She could have sworn he was finding the situation amusing.

"I created four overlapping mazes yesterday", she said. "Stairs will enable the dreamer to go from one maze to the other, completely different settings in each level, four different skies. It would still be the same dream level, but the intricacy of the maze is such that it would hide you from the projection for a crazy amount of time."

She picked up one particular drawing among those that littered the floor, but refrained from handing it out.

"Let's have it one more time. What are you doing here?"

He reached out not so suddenly, grasping a handful of her hair as his fingers settled at the nape of her neck, holding her still as he tipped her chair over with one deft kick.

The chair hitting the ground didn't make a sound, and all of a second there was no ground at all, her legs breaking through the floor, through water. Arthur was still holding her upright as her feet settled on the bottom of what seemed like a pool, a pool that would have grown inside her living room. She could see her furniture floating around, her drawings soaked, the ink whirling away in the water.

"I thought you might be missing it", Arthur said. He was definitely smiling this time.

Ariadne splashed water at him with both hands, seized the front of his shirt without having decided yet if she would hit him or kiss him, overwhelmed with questions and plans and ideas that she had waited weeks to experiment – she half intended to look around the floating sketches to show him one particular design.

Before she had clearly wrapped her mind around the fact that she was sleeping, dreaming, floating or simply that Arthur was here with her, the distant echo of Edith Piaf's voice reached her ears. Arthur was speaking, but she opened her eyes before she could hear more than her name.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

It seemed to Arthur he was always the first to wake up.

It might be the result of his being killed before his partners (his last death had occurred when a particularly vicious projection had slammed a window in his face; he had tripped over the windowsill, blood obscuring his eyes, and had fell from the thirtieth floor). Most dreams, however, he would simply be the first to react to the tune. He had time to collect himself and scan his surroundings before his partners opened their eyes, which had been a decisive factor when Cobb had searched for a point man. Cobb would haunt the dream until it was nothing more than a pile of ruins if he wasn't properly kicked.

Arthur watched Ariadne as she regained consciousness, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He turned her wrist over and gently drew out the needle.

"There is something ritual about this", she observed.

He noticed how she checked in her pocket for her totem, and he heard the distinctive click when the wooden bishop clinked against his dice. He had thought she would keep it that close – or dreamt it, maybe.

"I usually have breakfast at a café that's only a couple minutes from here.".

It felt as if they were hovering over water again, ready to break through the floor and immerse themselves, yet holding back. Ariadne beat him to the dive.

"And then I could create a dream for you, if you have the time."

"I have enough spare time for coffee and a dream."

That might have been the reason he came – one more immersion.

He distinctly felt the tangle of emotions under his well-kept façade. It was easy to sort out that mess; to dissociate his addiction to manufactured dreams and mind-breaking from his inability to dream in his sleep, to draw a line between his admiring Ariadne's skills and determination and the nagging idea that he might want her, in a way that was neither reasonable nor surreal and therefore completely uncalled-for.

He filed away each component until his mind was clear again.

She tied a green scarf around her neck and they went down the stairs, and her voice drifted back to him from a few steps ahead, confident and (consciously or not) slightly cruel.

"When was the last time you truly dreamt?"

"Four years ago", he replied. "And it was more of a nightmare than a dream."

He followed Ariadne into the brightly lit street, waited for her to speak. When she didn't, he reached out, folding his fingers upon her scarf, drawing her back.

"You shouldn't worry. Your dreams will come back. Your mind seems to be overcrowded with new creations, and that should bring the dreams back. For a while."

"It's not like I miss it that much", she lied.

They were a few feet away from the café when she suddenly grew tense. There were few noticeable clients on the terrace, a young man with a bulky nose and sunglasses reading a magazine and an ill-fitted couple, the refined woman dabbing at a sleeve of her light coat where the short man had spilled wine.

"Acquaintances of yours?" he asked.

Ariadne swiftly turned away from the scene and met his eyes, startling him before he could remark upon her nervousness. "Quick, give me a kiss."

He obliged.

As in the dream it lasted only a second before they both pulled away – a second that had been multiplied by ten from one the dream state to reality, he thought, and yet the feel of it was the same, a brush of Ariadne's that brought about the irreversibility of physical contact, as time broke rather than stopped.

The couple had migrated inside the restaurant, most likely to find a stock of napkins, and the other client was leafing through his magazine with a forlorn air that only a teenager could achieve.

"Did it have the desired effect?", Arthur asked.

They were both standing their ground as if no wall had ever been breached, Ariadne betrayed by the smallest of smiles. They both heard the sharp note his phone emitted to announce an incoming call, it was Ariadne who drew it out of his pocket.

"That's Eames", she noticed.

"Eames", he answered, as Ariadne watched him intently, close enough to hear their conversation.

"Get away from Ariadne, more pressing matters at hand", Eames proclaimed. "I think we have a problem", he added, weighting his words, "and I think we need to discuss it."

This exchange already announced a probable migraine, regardless of Eames' predilection for simplicity.

"In Moscow?"

"No, had to leave early this morning", Eames replied, "and I'd heard you were in Paris. There weren't a whole range of reasons for that. Pissed about your gadget still?"

There was a retort on Arthur's lips, as he recalled Eames' bleeding nose, but the argument that had followed, albeit verbal, had been far too raw to be brought back as banter.

"Is it preposterous to ask for some detail – any detail – so that I can understand why you're calling? If you know where I am I assume you called Cobb."

"When I said 'we', I wasn't only talking about you and me, Arthur - but I am flattered you thought so. You will forgive me for speeding things up a bit, but I've been trying to lose a tail for the last ten hours and the guy is persistent."

"Where do you want to meet, and what is this about?"

"Mombasa would be fine, you know where. We're tracked by some rival team. If I don't show up, disappear. And don't call Cobb right now."

Hours later, Eames would ask why he hadn't brought Ariadne – and Arthur would sharply reply it had seemed wise, obtaining a wide-eyed stare and a disbelieving "That was just plain stupid."

For once, he would keep silent.

**

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**

**Author Note**

_That chapter was painful to write – I am getting tired of thinking in English __(which is not my native language) and therefore producing simple sentences, I feel like the characters and scenes lack the depth they deserve… Hope this manages to satisfy you all, somehow – there is no way I'm starting it again tonight ^^"_


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Eames' appartment was as cluttered as a hotel room that wouldn't have been cleared of its successive occupants. Arthur lingered at the doorway for a while, unable to step inside what seemed like an eager trap.

Eames didn't go so far as to push him forward – his survival instinct was pronounced enough to prevent him from touching Arthur. He satisfied himself with a boisterous tone.

"Nothing here that bites, Arthur !"

"Not likely, with that smell", Arthur replied, recaping a bottle of Cologne as he passed and considering his hand for an instant - without finding any suitable surface to wipe it on.

"I've always wondered why you couldn't stand the very smell of me", Eames mused. He leaned against the window. "To answer your earlier question, no one else knows of this hideout, and finding us will be harder indoors than if we rushed about outside."

When Cobb had introduced them to each other, he had let out one single remark about their mutual antipathy – that instantaneous as it was, it could only be productive that as long as they shot in the same direction it would only encourage them to aim better. That job had gone by smoothly enough. Cobb wasn't aware, however, that Eames and Arthur had given their partnership another try, between that first job and the Fischer job.

Eames was in London at the time, he had needed a good point man, and whether it was the London weather or his professionalism, he had hired Arthur. There was one thing they agreed upon, up to ten times a day: a third team member would have been a brilliant idea. The job in itself turned out well, though such things happened in the mark's dream that at this day they still hadn't brought it up again.

"I thought you'd be showing off by now. You're the point man after all", Eames said.

Arthur seized a chair by its legs and sat once it had been cleared of Eames' gaudy shirts. He opened his notebook.

"I thought about the most likely components for this rival team you spoke of. Admitting Cobb, you and I are targeted, and that it is related not to our first common job but to the Fischer job, that team is after inception, or a method to achieve inception. Targeting us would mean they're trying to conceptualize it."

"Such deductive skills. You would almost manage this alone. They are at least five, one for each of us; Saito is probably off limits. We are not, even though we should still be under his protection. So, say five qualified team members hired by whichever corporation would have an interest in inception at the moment, and that makes a lot of them."

"They haven't made any move yet, so why did you have me _fly here_ ?"

"Pleasure of your company."

"Don't throw away so casually any chance you had of working with me again."

Eames let out a sharp laugh.

"That's just what we're about to do. No fancy board here, I'm afraid."

He bent forward, stole Arthur's notebook without ceremony and found a blank page, not without flipping though it first.

"Isn't that Ariadne in your Fischer dream? I recall the fancy hairbun. I always knew you were scribbling in that thing. Somehow the idea of you taking notes while I was speaking seemed ridiculous."

Arthur would have snapped if he hadn't snapped at least a dozen times since he had met Eames in the shabby coffee house downstairs. He contented himself with handing over his pen, and allowed himself a smirk when Eames couldn't figure out how to make it work.

"We have a rival team… which you've probably uncovered, hired by an unknown corporation… about which you will soon enlighten me." Eames wrote as he spoke in bold letters, using a marker instead of Arthur's smart pen. "Aim : inception, for motives we don't care about. At this time, we are the target, meaning they can't consider failure in their further job. They probably want a detailed account of our inception so that they can reproduce it somehow."

"They could have bought that account from us."

"Let's take for a fact that they aren't that clever and that they feared we might be hired instead of them – which means if they know we performed the inception, their employers don't."

"In that case the corporation is new to that business, or they would have heard of Cobb. However the team in itself has enough knowledge of Cobb to know who he would have hired."

"We're such a smart pair, the both of us", Eames said, but in a rush and with no hint of an actual tease. "Therefore, we have, you, Cobb, me." He hesitated. "Don't see how they could have found about Yusuf or Ariadne."

"They had to go after Cobb's previous chemists and architects first. Neither of which are alive I think. As you brought Yusuf he will be difficult to track, but anyone who knows Cobb will print a list of Miles' best students and study it."

Arthur loosened his tie and cast a restless look around. "I shouldn't have left Paris."

"Better if we work together, and if we don't lose sight of each other", Eames replied. "How often do you dream, Arthur ?"

Their eyes met. Eames had closed the black notebook and was lying back against the windowsill, perfectly at ease. Arthur was as he had ever been, slick and caustic, though his eyes were shadowed and slightly bloodshot.

"Don't go Cobb on me", Eames frowned. "Get some real sleep."

"No banter, pure concern. Eames, I'm flattered. Let's get back to a reasonable course of action. Are they tracking Cobb ?"

"He's supposedly hiding his kids and meeting us here. But knowing how he disposes of tails, I gave him an imaginary address where I can pick him up tonight, safe and sound."

Arthur sat up, the front legs of his chair slamming on the tiles. Back on track. "Fine, we can have him call Saito. The least we can expect is some funding – if word goes out of our inception on Fischer, Saito is going down, no matter how scarce the dream legislation. At best he could have a word with whoever hired that team."

"I'm not against disposing of them myself. They tried to tail me, but they made a mess of it and flunked what job I'd found in Moscow, and it involved forging the toyboy of a gorgeous lady coincidentally heiress to a couple diamond mines."

It was a few hours before Eames went off to find Cobb, hours which Arthur and the forger spent in games of wit and endless staring down matches none of them won. When Eames was gone, Arthur left the rickety chair to sit on the unmade bed.

He called Ariadne with practical and rational reasons in mind, reached the voicemail each time.

"This is Ariadne, _laissez un message. _If this is Arthur, you can do better than bucketloads of water. Try again."


End file.
